G’day mates! Good on ya for joinin us for another bonza ep of An Assemblage of Granidose and Bombastic Grandiloquents. Dear listener, I promise that that is as colloquially a greeting as you will ever receive - and it is warranted, for today, we are headed down under to the wild and wonderous Australia for today’s word: wombat.

Cheery listener, if you have never seen a wombat, I implore you to stop what you are doing and get to googling (please park your vehicle as necessary before proceeding, thank you). The wombat is a short-legged, muscular quadrupedal marsupial that is native to Australia. Wombats dig extensive burrow systems with their rodent-like front teeth and powerful claws. One distinctive adaptation of wombats is their backward pouch, the advantage of which is that when digging, the wombat does not gather soil in its pouch over its young. Although mainly crepuscular and nocturnal, wombats may also venture out to feed on cool or overcast days. They are not commonly seen, but leave ample evidence of their passage treating fences as minor inconveniences to be gone through or under, and leaving distinctive cubic feces. Also, they are very cute. Again, please google.

The word wombat comes from the Dhurag language, which referred to them as wambad, wambaj, or wambag. This language is an Australian Aboriginal language of the Yuin–Kuric group that was traditionally spoken in the region of Sydney, New South Wales. The Darug population was greatly and tragically diminished with the onset of colonisation. During the 1990s and the new millennium some descendants of the Darug clans in Western Sydney have been making considerable efforts to revive Dharug as a spoken language, and some modern Dharug speakers have given speeches in the Dharug language, with younger members of the community visiting schools and giving demonstrations of spoken Dharug. It is so important to preserve and capture the history of language for all communities and dialects.

Isn’t language wonderful?

Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber

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